The story gained traction after the woman's husband wrote a letter to the Mainichi Shimbun earlier this year and told of how the child care center director had created "shifts," letting women staff know when it was OK to get married and pregnant.
Yuichi Murayama, head of Hoiku kenkyujo (Child care research institute), said it is not uncommon for child care centers to have schedules of when their female providers can get married or pregnant.
"It happens against a backdrop of people avoiding child care as a profession, due to its low wages and long hours, and the shortage of staff that results from that," Murayama says.
"The system in which each individual child care provider accumulated experience over many years has collapsed, bringing down the quality of child care," he adds. "Determining child care providers' turns for when they can have children could be interpreted as a way for them to build experience over a long span of time without having to quit their jobs."